A wiki is a website that can be edited by a group of people. It allows groups to easily share ideas, work on documents together, and keep track of one another’s progress. It serves as a central repository where the documents can be accessed online at any time, given you have the correct privileges. This guide will show you have to use this powerful tool.

Navigating through a wiki can be difficult and seem counter intuitive until you get the hang of it. However, if you take the time to learn, you will find the navigation both powerful and easy to use. The image below and the following paragraphs detail the four major facets of the wiki’s navigation.

The trace is a history of wiki pages that you have visited. They are listed in reverse chronological order (oldest to newest) from left to right. For example, the trace in the image above shows that the user first went to the syntax page, then to the start page, the advantages page and is currently viewing the “how to use this wiki” page.

The Home/Start link will take you back to wiki’s home page. If you ever get lost, this link will always take you back to the start. Clicking on the CS306 wiki logo will also direct you to the same place.

The top navigation toolbar houses the following buttons:

Depending on your privileges and editing mode, this may also display “show page” and “show source”. If you are currently viewing a wiki page, clicking will button will allow you to edit the contents, given you have the correct privileges. If you are unauthorized to edit the page, it will display the wiki source in read-only. If you are editing a page, this will discard your changes and take you back the wiki page.

This button will take you to the discussion page where you can ask questions and discuss the content of this page.

This will show previous versions of the page, allowing a user to see who has editing this page and what changes have been made

This will show all the pages that have been changed recently along with the users who have last edited the page.

This will search the wiki

See the description detailed in the Top navigation toolbar section.

See the description detailed in the Top navigation toolbar section.

If you are currently logged in, this will log you out

This will show all the pages in the wiki that are viewable by you, grouped by namespace

This will take you to the top of the page

Like navigation, there are four different parts to the editing interface:

The editing toolbar allows one to quickly apply wiki formatting to text. The following table details the functions of the often used buttons below. The “application” collomn shows if the button can be used on existing text (by highlighting a block of text and then clicking the button) or if it can only create new text (after the button is clicked, it will prompt for input and create wiki code for that new inputted text).

Button	Action	Application
	Applies bold formatting	New or existing
	Applies italic formatting	New or existing
	Applies underlined formatting	New or existing
, , , ,	Applies various section header formatting	New or existing
	Inserts a link to an internal wiki page	New only
	Inserts a link to an external page	New only
	Inserts an ordered (numbered) list	New only
	Inserts an unordered (bulleted) list	New only
	Inserts your signature used to sign commets on the talk page	New only

The action toolbar contains three buttons: save, preview, and cancel which allows edits to the current page to be committed to the wiki, previewed (but not saved), and discarded, respectively.

This toolbar contains three buttons which modifies the textarea (the place where you edit the wiki page).

Button	Action
	Makes the textarea larger
	Makes the textarea smaller
	Toggles textwrap

This toolbar allows a summary to be entered along with your edit. Summaries are always a good idea as they allow others to quick figure out what you have changed. Your summary will appear when the recent changes and old revisions is displayed. The “Minor Changes” box should be checked when only minor modifications are made such as correction a spelling mistake or a small formatting change. This allows users to skim over minor changes to see what major things have changed in the wiki

This is meant as a quick reference and introduction to the wiki syntax. For a more in depth discussion and examples, see the syntax page

Description	syntax	example usage	result
Bold	**Bold Text**	we have an **awesome** case	we have an awesome case
Italic	//Italic Text//	this is a //bad// idea	this is a bad idea
Underline	__Underlined Text__	__Lawyer 1:__ are you sure?	Lawyer 1: are you sure?
Wiki link	[[Internal Link|display text]]	sign the [[honor pledge|GMU Honor Pledge]]	sign the [[honor pledge|GMU Honor Pledge]]
Web link	[[http://example.com|External Link]]	See the [[http://cs.gmu.edu|department's]] home page	See the department's home page
Footnotes	((Your Note Here))	FIXME((a note can include **wikicode** and even [[http://www.google.com/|links]] :) ))	1)
Notes/Tips	<tip>Note text</tip>	<tip>This needs to be reworked</tip>	This needs to be reworked

Feel free to contact the maintainer of this wiki, Peter Naudus, if you have any questions.